The Viral Me

Cupertino is where Apple is. Palo Alto is where Facebook is. Mountain View is where Google is. Geographically speaking, then, Y Combinator, let’s call it YC, is in Googletown, a flat suburban place dotted with low bungalows and bathed almost always in sunlight. On a side street here, more of a service road, really, sits the small building that houses the company. It hardly exists at all, physically. It’s just two rooms—the office, where the three full-time employees can sometimes be found, and the main room, which, with its bright plywood picnic tables and orange acoustic tiling, looks like the dining hall at one of the better youth hostels in Denmark. YC is a kind of tech-industry incubator, maybe the most important in the world. It’s the place where people are trying to invent the ways we’re going to behave, at least as far as the Internet goes, in the future.

The first person I meet at YC is an entrepreneur named Jiggity, who is 22 years old and got his computer-science degree from MIT about twenty minutes ago. His real name isn’t Jiggity; it’s something Korean, but Jiggity is "more memorable when I’m meeting a whole lot of people." Jiggity is building something called Teevox, which is going to turn your iPhone into a remote control for your computer. A remote control that can search and play every movie, TV show, album, video, etc., that exists on your hard drive. (YC lesson one: Your smartphone is now, or will be, your basic interface with the world.)

The way things work at YC is like this: You and your co-genius collaborator apply out of Stanford, MIT, or Cal (more or less); if YC accepts you (it accepts only 3 percent of applicants), it gives you $20,000 (in exchange for a portion of your company), helps you develop your product, and, three months later, puts you in front of a room filled with the most important investors in Silicon Valley to ask for money—money you will get, and often in large quantities. The average YC business emerges from the three-month start-up process worth millions of dollars.

Jiggity lays out for me a future where his product is central to the way we live our lives, filled as they are with a constantly proliferating collection of DVRs and MP3s and MPEG-4 files and streaming video, etc. Teevox will make finding and playing all that media so much simpler. Especially when people finally realize that TVs are basically going to be giant high-def computer monitors.

Of course, there is also a social element to Teevox. Almost all the consumer products (hereafter: thingies) being built at YC are straight-up social-media products or have features meant to take advantage of what is known as the social layer of the Internet. It’s kind of a priori now that to get the low-hanging fruit on the Internet, your thingy has to in some way exploit our apparently bottomless desire to share the details of our lives and thoughts with people we kind of know.

Teevox’s social element is that you will be able to "see" all your "friends" all the time and know which movie or TV show they’re watching and watch it "with" them if you want. Just a tiny facet of the coming era of the kinder, gentler panopticon, when all our lives will be transparent.

Jiggity sits at one of the picnic tables and pitches me for about an hour and a half, his fuzzy halo of hair bobbing emphatically with each gesture, sweat forming on his brow, his constant smile transmitting, I think, a shadow of resentment. Resentment—and he never said this—that for his product to succeed at the scale he wants it to, people like me would probably have to adopt it. People who are a little confused by stuff like Twitter but also kind of self-congratulatorily contemptuous of it.

The reason I’m here is to try to see social media through the eyes of people like Jiggity. For the past month, I’ve been trying to fully engage with the social layer. I joined and contributed to such services and platforms as Quora, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Blippy, Swipely, DailyBooth, Goodreads, Daytum, etc., etc. I tried to tweet five times a day. I gave two sites access to my credit cards so I could share my purchases with my friends. I did my best to check in wherever I went on Foursquare. And what it all made me feel, mostly, was stupid. And anxious—that I didn’t have enough people following me and then that I was the kind of person who wants people to follow him. Every update, every tweet, every check-in, ultimately began to feel not unlike doing my expenses. The experience isn’t unusual. I think old people like me (I’m 38) often do this stuff to feel like the world hasn’t yet left them behind, but we don’t have any natural hunger for it. It’s kind of like androids having sex: We know we’re supposed to do it, but we’re not really sure why. Meanwhile, and infuriatingly, we know that humans just like to bone.

Jiggity and I are joined by another entrepreneur, a guy named Rahul, a slender 27-year-old Englishman of Indian extraction who’s 50 percent hair and 50 percent brain. He jumps right in on the question of whether I’ll ever start to enjoy social media. "The average male loves to be the clown," Rahul says. "He loves to be the center of attention and to tell jokes. What if he could do that at scale? With all your friends all the time? With more friends than you could previously have done? And have the affirmation of more and more people? That’s powerful."

Sitting here pinioned between the photon-cannon brains and futurey salesmanship of Rahul and Jiggity, I realize there’s something that makes me simultaneously excited and agitated. It is an unfamiliar sensation: optimism. Jiggity knows. Rahul knows. Everyone at YC knows. The world belongs to them. You can hardly be alive in 2010 and not know that. You can’t know what Facebook is without knowing that. This—Silicon Valley in general and YC more specifically—might be the last place in America where people are this optimistic. The last place in America where people aren’t longing for a vague past when we were the shit.

Let’s Scale Ourselves!

"So who am I?" Rahul says. "I’m a computer scientist. I’ve never had a real job. I’ve known since I was 15 years old that what I wanted to do was start and grow a software company. And I’ve been doing that since college. In 2006, I started a Ph.D. at Cambridge, because I had this crazy delusion that doing that was a really good way to start a technology company. I quit one and a half years ago. Then I ran the part of [Cambridge] that helps staff and students start businesses. And I ran that so well and we raised so much money that I could pay myself to do it full-time. One of the things I’m reasonably good at is sales and raising money. Shortly after that, we started Rapportive."

Rahul projects like he’s a speaker at a TED conference, with a ton of enthusiasm and, more important, human accessibility. This is part of the program in Silicon Valley—being a person. There’s a real cultural aversion to putting on airs, a premium on "exposing" yourself as a human being. Here, the rich and powerful all wear jeans and T-shirts with geeky phrases on them. The offices, even of companies worth millions or billions of dollars, can feel like underfunded start-ups. At thingy headquarters there are often no private offices, only big open rooms with tables and chairs. Mark Zuckerberg, the prime avatar of this generation, doesn’t even have a private office. It’s the cultural antithesis of the power centers of New York City, where you put on a costume that obscures the idea that you’re a regular person. If you’re wearing a costume in Silicon Valley start-up world, it’s the costume of a genius living on ramen who doesn’t care about money (Zuckerberg doesn’t appear to spend any of his money), a person so enthralled with thingies that he has abandoned whatever high-status position he had before to build them. (This is part of the required narrative: To make your thingy, you have to quit something impressive, like Cambridge or Google or McKinsey Co.)

Rapportive, Rahul explains, is an application that inserts the social layer into every e-mail you receive. "Imagine if, whenever anybody e-mailed you, you could open the e-mail and instantly see their photograph, their occupation—what they do, their recent tweets, their activities on Facebook. Let me show you what that would look like." Rahul opens up a message on Gmail, and on the right flank, instead of ads, you can see data from Rapportive: a photograph of the sender and a summary of information about him from whatever social-media platform the sender uses—LinkedIn, Mixcloud, etc. "We just raised a million dollars to build that."

I ask him why one would want all that information about whoever happens to e-mail you. "Lots of reasons," he says. "Imagine you want to hire someone: I’ve had a number of e-mails from people saying, ’It’s very interesting looking at the social lives of people who are applying for jobs.’ Because seeing someone’s recent tweets is actually more valuable than reading someone’s résumé. So that’s the new economy. That’s the new world of personal interactions. And Rapportive exposes that, and we believe in it."

How do you get all that information about people?

"We’re all spewing a lot of information out into the Web; some of us know about it and some of us don’t. Rapportive is collecting all of that and putting it into one place. We’re very careful not to find anything that you couldn’t find in half an hour of Googling. We just save you that half an hour."

I still have an embarrassingly antiquated idea of what people mean by "privacy" when they complain about, say, Facebook. To me the danger is basically some Russian guy who steals my credit card number. Or Google knowing my porn predilections. Both of those things are certainly happening. But the "private" stuff that’s most likely to get you into trouble is the information you willingly share—semipublic stuff provided by you that can become known by audiences you don’t anticipate. My reflexive response to that privacy fear would be to pull all data whatsoever from the public sphere—erase my Facebook account, stop with the Twitter. People like Rahul have the opposite solution: Flood the social layer with information you want out there about yourself.

(If you’re confused by the term social layer, think of the word layer as meaning "lens." The social layer is one lens you can look through to see the content of the Internet. Who you’re connected to, what they’re connected to, what they like and don’t like.)

"More and more people are going to have careers where they move from one thing to another fairly publicly," Rahul says. "And what people are really investing in is your track record. Your brand. What you do and what you say and what you think are just as important as your skills. Specifically for me, for our company, it’s very important for me to be known, to have credibility, and to have opinions."

Rahul isn’t worried about people knowing who he is; he’s worried about not enough people knowing who he is. I had this idea when I was in the midst of my ill-fated share-athon the previous month: Maybe the social layer could be a kind of mass experiment in the liberating nature of extreme truth. We’d all be exposed as needy, nostalgic, compassionate self-Googlers. But to people like Rahul, an open society isn’t one where people have access to the real you. It is simply providing access to the identity you very carefully construct for human consumption.

"So how is [your thingy] going to help me?" I said.

"You need to rapidly respond to people, and you need to know a lot about them," Rahul says. "I have a thousand and something followers on Twitter. And I’ve interacted with pretty much all of them at one point or another. Personally. I need to scale that to tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands. It’s a brand. It’s powerful!"

"You’re selling a product, so that makes sense," I say. "But don’t those tools make people who don’t have products begin to see themselves as the product?"

"That’s a good point. I believe that more people are going to work for themselves, and more people are going to do what they’re passionate about. If you love Disney characters, fuck it, go and monetize Disney characters. If you love Apple laptops, go and become an authority on that and gain a following. This wasn’t possible ten years ago. What we’re talking about is monetizing passion. Monetizing authority."

"But why is that good? Am I actually going to enjoy myself more?"

"You’ll be a bigger person. More people can appreciate who you are more often."

"Don’t you think the need to be a quote- unquote bigger person leads to unhappiness and anxiety?"

"I think it’s more likely to lead to happiness than material possessions, than the pursuit of more wealth."

"But isn’t it precisely the same as the pursuit of more wealth? It’s just replacing money with followers."

"Yes it is. But don’t reduce it to a number."

Thank You, Facebook!

We can’t really move forward without talking about the elephant in the room. When you say "social media" to someone who isn’t super techie, he’s likely to say, "What’s that? Oh, you mean Facebook?" And I’m here to tell you the answer to that question is yes. Social media is Facebook. Before I came out here, I didn’t really know why Facebook was such a big deal. It had more than 500 million users, which I know is a ton. And I knew that this spring, according to one of the companies that track Internet activity, FB surpassed Google as the most trafficked Web site in the world, the only time anyone displaced Google in three years—and it’s been number one ever since. But I didn’t really understand how it was any different from MySpace or Friendster—or a lot of other companies that didn’t end up being as powerful or worth as much as everyone thought. And I can tell you now that, according to basically everyone who has more than ten bucks to invest in Silicon Valley, it’s different. That it has, as they say, won. Bear with me if you know this stuff already.

First of all, Facebook made identities on the Internet real. People have been pouring embarrassing information onto the Internet for decades now, but no one knew, because there was no Facebook. Facebook has become, in Silicon Valley received-wisdom shorthand, the White Pages of the Internet. It’s where everyone is. If you’re looking for an actual person from the real world, the first place to look now is FB. And most people who know what they’re talking about don’t think that’s going to change, because 500 million users have, together, a lot of gravity. It’s hard to move them all at once. Would it be fun to join another social network if you couldn’t find people on it? (Though I also think, as an outsider, that the one thing the Internet has taught us lately is that nothing has gravity.)

Okay. So first it owns your identity. Then it owns your connections. Your friendships. If someone has an interesting bit of information (I got divorced! I had a baby! Look at my pictures from Mexico!), FB knows exactly who might be interested in that bit of information. It is the only place with the channels already up and programmed to distribute it. And you’re more likely to pay attention to information delivered through FB’s channels because it’s coming from people you presumably know and trust and might even like. FB has built the infrastructure of the social layer. Anyone who wants to use it has to use FB’s skeleton. Which is fine with FB. One of the smartest things FB ever did was make its connections available for any other party to use. You want to sign in almost anywhere? Just use FB Connect. Why compete with FB when it’s expensive to compete with FB, and you’re going to lose, and it lets you use its network for free? A by-product of that is that FB knows a lot about you. Like, more than you tell it. Rahul says it’s not long until it knows when you get married or when you die, even if no one directly lets it know. One of the founders of a YC company called 1000Memories.com (it’s FB for dead people, only more interesting) says he heard FB can already tell when you’re about to break up with someone: certain communication patterns emerge.

One of the guys I talked to about why FB is so powerful is Angus Davis, CEO of a company called Swipely, one of the services for "sharing" information about all your credit card purchases with your friends. If you buy new sneakers at Niketown or a Protein Berry Razzmatazz at Jamba Juice, as long as you use a credit card Swipely has access to, it will appear in your feed. It is one of those Internet businesses so far out on the periphery of social sharing that even people who adopt nearly everything are a little scared to use it. But the endgame for these businesses is different from what it seems.

"The big change, the big shift in the Internet that’s happened in the past three or four years, is the shift toward social being the most important thing," Angus says. "So now increasingly you discover content or care about content in the context of your friends. Up until now, Google’s PageRank has been the dominant way that content gets sorted, ordered, and found on the Internet. And the threat from Facebook is to say, ’Wait, we’re going to reorder the whole Internet, all the content out there. And instead of its being based around some algorithm that a search engine says is important, we’re going to base it around who you are, who your friends are, and what those people are interested in.’"

A more pessimistic way to look at it is that we’re slave labor, getting lured by our desire to show off what we buy (Swipely) or our witty repartee (Twitter), by our need for affirmation (all of the above), or by our habit of looking at pictures of girls from high school all day instead of doing work (FB), and we end up not only driving traffic to these sites but filtering information so that FB and Twitter and Swipely can capitalize on it. They would say they’re just trying to make it easier for us to find movies we like. That’s probably true, too.

How to Get a Million People to Share Pictures of Themselves

YC has turned out 208 companies since it started four years ago. Like I said, they’ve got an incredible track record of success, and they’ve gained a lot of power here. In fact, a few days after I leave, Silicon Valley will be swept by the news of a kind of collusion against YC—what will become known on practically every business-journalism outlet as "Angelgate." A lunch will be held at some place called Bin 38. At this lunch will be Silicon Valley’s most influential superangels. (That’s a real title you can have, but remember, we’re talking about a place where people call themselves—literally have printed on their business cards—"Resident Ninja.") According to some credible leaks, part of the lunch dealt with how to stem the growing power of YC. That’s how good these people are at picking their entrepreneurs and honing their ideas. The other part of the discussion—and some attendees have denied this—was reportedly about how to do some old-fashioned monopolistic price-fixing.

Still, YC’s success is a particular Silicon Valley kind of success. The most impressive YC companies aren’t necessarily household names: Dropbox, Scribd, Bump, Posterous, Reddit, Airbnb. But YC is essentially taking educated bets about what the next Facebook, Twitter, Mint.com are, and these companies are handicapped pretty well for that. One of YC’s big successes in the past year is a company called DailyBooth. It’s like Twitter—it’s a platform for communication, you can "follow" people, and people can "follow" you—but instead of typing 140 characters, you just take pictures of yourself. Here I am in my room in my pajamas. Here I am at Starbucks. Here I am in my new sweater. Here I am in my room again in my pajamas. (It seems like, as often as not, a DailyBooth picture is of someone in his bedroom in pajamas.) That’s the whole thing. There’s no pretext that you have information you need to get across or a really good joke. It’s a thingy that, you might argue, reduces the psychological physics of the social layer to its simplest equation: I’m alive right now; I’m a person; look at me.

DailyBooth is a good way to see one of the central parados of the social layer. People engage in this stuff, I think, for the affirmation. To prove that they exist. But in effect, the collection and aggregation of all those photos, all those bits of unique self-expression from, literally, 500 million people (and Zuck says that a billion is basically a fait accompli) actually nullifies humanity. True, the smallest detail of your life might be amplified and spread instantly across what is the simplest and most effective distribution network ever invented. But more likely is that detail being almost instantly buried by the incredible volume of other people’s smallest details.

DailyBooth launched about a year ago, and though its traffic isn’t huge, it grew 1,000 percent this year. Go to DailyBooth.com and watch the live feed. It’s breathtaking. And I don’t mean that in a glib way. It’s breathtaking the way Facebook is if you stop to think about the snapshot of us that’s captured in its billions of gigabytes of cached human need. The live feed is a record of every single self-portrait posted to DailyBooth. You see a face blossom onto the feed, at the top where everyone is looking; then, three seconds later, you watch it get pushed down by the next face, and three seconds later pushed farther by another face, and down again until that person is gone, probably never found again. The faces are mostly too young to have any kind of a protective shell. Faces with a profound, Clearasil kind of beauty. The sheer number of sideways hats is astonishing. And the number of displayed soft drinks—so many people are at a loss for what to say about themselves except that they’re drinking a Coke. As a little experiment, I’ll take a three-minute break from typing this right now, at 8:41 p.m. on Wednesday, October 6, 2010, and write down what people say: A sexy girl asks, is her picture "Facebook worthy?" A girl with a giant plastic bong writes: "this is the most amazing thing i have ever smoked out of / my face basically explains how amazing this is / i am so medicated right now." A (relatively) older woman types: "Like I need one more social media network to keep up with...but I can’t resist! Love this site!"

The company was started by two guys, Ryan, 24, and Jon, 23. It operates out of a few hundred square feet in an office building near the entrance to the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Today (late August 2010) they’re working on their iPhone app—eight people work for DailyBooth, and the most recent hire is a guy whose specialty is building interfaces for phones. There are a bunch of worktables, new ethereally lit Macs, a wonky VoIP line, some sandwich stuff in the fridge, and a shitload of whiteboards. Ryan is from suburban Cincinnati, and Jon’s from the UK. They’ve never worked, geographically, together—Jon still lives in England. They met in a Web-development chat room. They’ve been building stuff since puberty: Jon sold his first Web application when he was 13 for $2,000; Ryan sold some Web-development software when he was 20 for $40,000. When YC granted them an interview after they applied, they didn’t have the cash to buy plane tickets, so they spent half a day building an application that worked on Twitter and auctioned it off on a Web site. Day to day, the company is now operated by a 30-year-old guy named Brian Pokorny, who used to be an angel investor. (I guess the answer is yes, you can be a former angel investor when you’re 30.)

The original idea for DailyBooth was that people would go there every day and upload a photo. Those pictures would be archived on the site and turned into a kind of time-lapse movie of you growing up. But given the tools provided, people didn’t want to create an arty movie. They wanted to look at and comment on and flirt with one another. So the founders built that instead. (YC lesson two: Fuck the business plan. Throw your thingy up as soon as possible, see how people use it, and change it to fit what they want.)

The first thing I want to know is why, apparently, people on DB don’t feel exposed, vulnerable, embarrassingly narcissistic. "There was a study done," Brian says. "They gave people video cameras. Everyone over the age of 25 would turn it outward, and everyone under the age of 25 would turn it inward. This is the first platform that captured this behavior of turning the camera inward. It created a platform for communication around that one behavior. Look at the iPhone 4. It has two cameras—they added one specifically to face inward. And the fact that Steve Jobs, who’s sort of the person who defines what’s acceptable in technology and behavior, put this here? So this behavior is becoming even more acceptable."

Brian takes me under his wing for the time I’m in Silicon Valley, because I kind of make him take me under his wing. He’s a student of the social layer, complete with theses and examples. Before DailyBooth, he spent four years as the right-hand man to Ron Conway, the most prolific angel investor in Silicon Valley (he was an early investor in Twitter, PayPal, Foursquare, Google, etc., etc.). Brian’s job was to evaluate twenty companies a week for Ron, to tell him where to put his money, to develop theories about which thingies work and which don’t, to help instruct him in how the Internet evolves vis-&#xE0;-vis human psychology. (A more general thesis about the basic disappointment of the Internet: It ultimately evolves only where it meets human desire, which itself is geared for life circa 200 b.c. If the Internet ultimately disappoints, it’s because it was made for humans. Give us instant connection to everyone and the ability to collaborate in vast seamless networks and we spend 99 percent of those resources telling everyone what kind of oatmeal we ate for breakfast and 1 percent of it building Wikipedia.) The reason he quit his job with Ron Conway is that DailyBooth was an almost chillingly perfect distillation of the theories he had about what a thingy needs to be virally, scalably successful.

Brian’s first theory is about something he calls friction. Friction is what you don’t want. Friction is what keeps people from signing up for your site or downloading your app. Because it’s too expensive, because it’s too embarrassing, because it’s too difficult, because it’s difficult at all. The Internet has been working to reduce friction. To make everything easier to use, easier to sign up for, easier to navigate, cheap, free, freer than free. In a perfect world, there’d be friction if someone didn’t sign up for your thingy. Again, FB has it right: It’s frictive to not have an FB account; just ask anyone who has to explain six times a day why he doesn’t have one.

Okay, people want to share stuff with the world. So the Internet gives us blogs. Lots of people use them. But you need to know how to code HTML to have a blog. So that’s a problem, and the people in Silicon Valley realize that. They get busy and build blogging platforms so those of us who don’t want to read manuals or learn how to do something hard can still tell everyone what we think. Blogger, then MovableType, then Tumblr., and so on. But there’s still a creative friction—you still have to have something entertaining to say. Even on MySpace, you were basically building and maintaining your own static Web site. That’s what Facebook made easier. You’re not in charge of doing anything besides populating the fields on your profile page, uploading some pictures, typing some words into the status-update box. You don’t have to be saying anything besides "At O’Hare," or "Mayonnaise is awesome." Same concept with Twitter: You only have 140 characters—there aren’t paralyzing creative options here. But Brian Pokorny thinks DailyBooth appeals to people who want even less friction than Twitter: Here, you don’t need to think of something witty or informative to say in 140 characters or fewer. All you have to do is take a picture of yourself.

"I kind of studied a lot of the people on YouTube and Foursquare," he says. "The thing that was compelling was that, in four to five months [since it launched], DailyBooth already had a subset of the main YouTubers using it, which was one set of early adopters. And not only did they like it but it was an order of magnitude of less friction for them to publish a photo than it was to edit a video for ten hours. And they’d get the same feedback."

There’s a second theory that makes DailyBooth a kind of elegant, perfectly simple social-media product. It’s closely related to the friction concept, only this one violates one of the laws of thermodynamics: You have to get more out of a system than you put into it. "In the best products, you put minimal amounts in," Brian says, "and you get a lot back out. Like Twitter. You follow ten people. You maybe tweet once in a while. And you get all this news content and information. You don’t have to do very much, and you get a lot back. Facebook? The same thing. You connect to your friends and, boom, you’re flooded with all this stuff. Maybe you put in one thing, and all day long you get all this stuff to look at. DailyBooth, the same thing. You take one picture and you get ten comments back for one post."

Ashvin Kumar, the Scariest Man on the Internet

I’d wager that of all the companies I’ve mentioned in this article, the one that freaks you out the most is Swipely. The place where you give it access to your credit card and it starts sharing all your purchases with your "friends." I mean, let’s start with "give it access to your credit card." But there’s a business that freaks people out more than Swipely. It’s called Blippy. (I know, I know: You might think that Internet companies might try not naming themselves something nonsensical that implies lots of exclamation points.) Blippy is like Swipely with one big functional difference. Blippy displays how much money you spent on something. If you buy a $365 sweater at Barneys, your Blippy friends will know you bought a $365 sweater at Barneys.

The people who invented this thing must, I figure, be either extraordinarily craven or idealistic and visionary in some way I don’t yet understand. And I mean that sincerely; the more I learn about social-media products, the more I realize that their true purpose often isn’t clear, even to the people who use them. I meet one of the Blippy founders, Ashvin Kumar, at a diner in Palo Alto.

"Since we were the first to do this, we kind of, like, carved out this niche in people’s consciousness as being this radical thing," Ashvin said, without my bringing up the fact that even people who are self-proclaimed oversharers are scared of Blippy. "You’ve tried it; you know it’s not that radical."

He’s right. It doesn’t feel radical when you use it. When you buy something, Blippy asks you to review it—to do more of the filtering the social layer needs to organize the Internet for you. Every time I reviewed something, it went into the live feed, and a few minutes later I would get a bunch of positive responses. People clicked "awesome" or "informative" or "funny." It felt good. It felt like I’d finally found what most of us are looking for: a place where people would listen to us and congratulate us on our opinions about everything.

The system is gamed for that to happen. How do you make people be nice to one another? First, you install buttons for "awesome" and "funny." Second, you use real identities. The social layer means that you have a static identity on the Internet. And while that’s more likely to help your future boss find the picture of you with the cock and balls drawn on your forehead (thanks, Rahul!), it also makes the Internet a kinder, more compassionate, more polite place. If people know it’s really you commenting on something on Blippy—you, the guy with the Facebook account and the girlfriend named Polly and the Phish fan page and all that—you’re much less likely to act like a creep. And third, you establish that behavior immediately. If the first hundred people who use the site behave a certain way, the next hundred thousand will behave the same way. It’s creating a feedback loop that makes you want to come back to the Web site. And the feedback loop is what forms the right addictive behavior for the site to work. Addiction is requisite.

Now that the social layer has been built, some people say the next layer will be the game layer. The game layer will install game mechanics in everything, and game mechanics are a way to manipulate human behavior. The optimists say that we can use game mechanics to manipulate ourselves to be better—nicer, more productive, not as fat—and that the companies who figure out how to install that layer will be the next Facebooks. Here’s how Rahul explains it: "The biggest trend in Web applications right now is adding game design. With the theory of game design, you want a curve like this: increasingly large payoffs at random but increasingly spaced intervals. So the first payoff is very small, and the next payoff is a little bigger, and the next one… To begin with, you get a payoff one out of five actions, then it’s one out of twenty, then it’s one out of fifty—but those intervals have to be random. That is the key to human addiction. And any system that has that property, whether it’s Facebook, World of Warcraft, or physical drugs—that’s what makes business work. Facebook is very watered-down. They could ratchet up the gaming significantly."

Game mechanics mostly means overtly turning thingies into games. Part of the reason people share their location with Foursquare is that by using it you’re playing a kind of real-life game. By checking in, you can become "mayor" of your favorite bar, you can unlock "badges," etc. That feature is basically for people who don’t understand why they’re using Foursquare—the company wants to give them an artificial reason to keep using it until they figure out what they like about it. But even without the overt game mechanics, the gamelike nature of social interaction is why we’re addicted to social media in general. It’s why I’m addicted to e-mail. Most e-mails I get are bullshit. But every once in a while, I get an e-mail that feels affirming in some special way—someone I like thought of me, someone is saying something nice to me, someone is telling me he wants to give me money, my wife is sending pictures of our daughter. Ergo, I check my e-mail about every twenty-seven seconds. You can’t totally blame the Internet for the fact that we’re basically crackheads. Our bodies are designed with the flaw of wanting to be crackheads. And manipulating that flaw is partly how you get 500 million users for your thingy.

I say as much to Ashvin: "Doesn’t the Internet just want me to be on the Internet all the time? Isn’t that what the social layer is? ’Wait, don’t go! Your friends are here! We have pictures of your ex-fiancée! Someone might think you’re cute! Everyone wants to know what you think of Nights in Rodanthe because you’re "awesome" and "funny" and "informative"!’"

"The one thing in the world that everyone’s going to compete for is people’s attention," Ashvin says. "It all depends on your attention. If you hang out on Mint.com for an hour every day, then they have your attention. And if they can sustain that attention with relevant information, whether it’s with advertising or not, they’re succeeding."

Is that all social media is doing? Playing psychological video games in ways that form habits and drive revenue for Internet companies? Ashvin says no. And he points to Quora as an example of why this isn’t the case. Quora actually does make you feel optimistic. It’s a thingy that is meant to harness the collective knowledge of all the smart people who use the Internet and get them to answer human questions and provide nuanced human answers. Because, he says—and the man is correct on this point—the quality of information on the Internet sucks right now. (Anyone who tells you how much better the Internet made things should think about that.) Basically, he says, if you want information, you end up on Wikipedia. Quora is used by basically everyone in Silicon Valley now. All the famous people are on there, sharing high-quality information and shoring up their own online identities—their personal identities—and in the process helping the world be less dumb.

"Quora is going to—if they continue to do what they’re doing—compete with Google," Ashvin says. "Think about the Google-search experience: not very intuitive. The right way to ask a question is to ask a question and put a question mark at the end. The thing about Quora is there’s no notion of technology trying to figure this stuff out. A human question is put into a feed of topics, and people who are experts in that will answer the question. And they’re building this corpus of information. It’s not social in the traditional sense that ’Oh, he’s my friend.’ In the world of Quora, and in the world of information identity, a stranger is often more important than a friend. Especially if the stranger is the expert on the topic that I need to know about."

A Short Coda About a Happy, Social Place

There actually is a place where the future is bright, where all the most utopian visions about the capabilities of social media are manifest in the real world. Where everyone is connected to everyone, and those connections make everyone’s life richer, make everyone more creative, more successful, more interesting, more fulfilled. There’s a place where most people use the hive mind and the greased rails of communication to make astonishing things. It’s here: Mountain View. Silicon Valley. Start-up Land.

This isn’t just the place where they invent this shit; it’s the single place where the life that’s advertised is lived. Where the adoption rate, if the product is right, approaches 100 percent. Where the world has been mapped out by the inquisitive people with GPS-equipped smartphones and Foursquare, and difficult technical questions are answered by friendly experts you don’t know. (It’s hardly a coincidence that the one area of Quora that’s already fleshed out is the part about how to build thingies.) It’s like that because it’s a small world, filled with highly educated people with similar interests and a deep philosophical understanding of what the point of all this stuff is. That it’s the perfect social network doesn’t just mean Silicon Valley is more efficient at making stuff. It affects the products they make. Products that promise to, if we can work together, systematize the world. It’s a place where there’s a deep belief that human society can be perfected. These people, the Ashvins, are optimistic not only because theirs is the last ascendant American industry but because implied in all those products is the idea that the human problem can be solved. They’re working in a world—the Internet—that’s wholly manipulable, that behaves according to rules. A world like a geometry textbook. And that way of thinking bleeds out into how they design stuff for us to use.

But you know why I think they’re really happy? Because they get to build all this stuff. The act of creation is maybe the most frictive thing going. Using the stuff is meant to be frictionless, but making it isn’t. And their happiness comes from friction. Most happiness probably comes from friction. It’s why having sex with someone you’ve fallen in love with (not the easiest, safest process, falling in love) is so much better than having sex with a prostitute (no friction there). And that is why the happiest and most fulfilled people who use social media are here. Making it. The only problem is that it’s not scalable. That’s the flaw, really, with this: The only way to scale it is to remove the friction.

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